The State of Things
There comes a time in every man's life where they must apologize for past mistakes and hope to make ammends while moving forward. That time will be in a few months, when I try to reconcile this situation once again and retract most of the statements I've made here due to my sheer inability to complete them. Anyways, here it comes. If you haven't noticed, I haven't uploaded a new episode for Sol 10 in about.... well, the last episode was uploaded in the middle of April. Let's just say that. At the time of this writing, it is has been nearly 6 and 1/2 months since that episode has been uploaded. That's a bit too long, I find myself thinking. If you remember back to April, you might remember that I had planned the next episode to be released at the beginning of May, giving me about two weeks before every Sol 10 episode. Back then, that was an attainable goal. It took me about a week to get ideas down on paper and outlined, and then that weekend I would do the bulk of the writing. I would finish up the rest of the writing throughout the rest of that week, and release the episode on that weekend. It worked for about two weeks, so I assumed I could feasibly continue this for the rest of the Sol 10 run. Hell, in summer, I was planning to ramp up production even further. So, what happened? Why hasn't there been a new Sol 10 episode in half a year? Let's look at some of the possible and plausible reasons for this undeclared hiatus, in my favorite way to do it: Bullet and debunk, just like we did to the Nazis and in 'Nam. *'You were drowning in fangirls because of how good your first two episodes were. '''God, I wish. And no, actually, I think both of the episodes I released were shit. *'You hate BTFF or infamous BTFF user x.' Listen, buddy, if I hated you, I would have just left this website a long time ago instead of staying a part of the borderline-cancerous Discord and continuously updating my pages. *'You had depression. No, actually, I think Sol 10 was the pole I needed to polevault my way out of the shitty stained sports mat that is depression and into whatever the hell the point of polevaulting is. *'''You ran out of ideas. You can't run out of something as long as you keep stealing it, hombre. *'You focused on academics.' Truth be told, I learn more from researching stuff to write about than I do just being bored and doing nothing but studying. So no. *'You listened to too many albums instead of writing.' If you look closely you'll notice that almost everything in Sol 10 is a music reference, so not really. Music is kind of my motivation for writing this stuff. *'You lacked motivation.' Kinda. It's true that I didn't write much because I didn't feel like it, but that's not the whole reason. *'You wrote yourself into a corner, with the subpar ideas slowly building into walls around you. You couldn't remove one of the ideas, or else the wall would collapse onto you. This fear of collapse dissuaded you from continuing.' Ding ding ding, we have a Winrar. That might not make any sense to you, so let's take a look at the past plans of Sol 10 and see how it came to be. How Sol 10 Came to Be Sol 10 started as an offshoot of Mark of the Universe. That series is still relatively faithful to the original plans, so I won't spoil much of it. While Mark of the Universe was my "space epic", like Homestuck or something akin to it, Sol 10 was a series to be basd around filler, where I could do anything I'd like and "let loose". The first iteration of Sol 10, which came into existence around January of 2017, was a loose idea, based on the Scott Pilgrim comic books. You had Sol, an indie little boy, who made friends with various incredible people. One of those such was Laika, a strange little creature inside of a mech with guns for hands. Together, the two discovered that the world was coming to an end, and thus set off to stop it in a fight against some (undecided) villains atop a giant demon's head in an event known as the Clash at Demonhead. It was essentially the setup to a massive reference. There was a kicker, though- Sol could never die. The story revolved around a boy who kept watching his friends die for him, only to be revived. This was linked to the Omnitrix, who in turn was linked to a strange old man in the sky. The Captain had the same power. He had expected to be revived, and this hubris lead to his death, because the Omnitrix simply didn't want to revive him due to his little value/respect of life. This was a shitty idea. Nevertheless I sat down to write it. At that point, however, I had a massive problem. I didn't know how to start it. If you'll get rid of Jules' introduction, Sol 10 starts with Sol cowering at the edge of a highway. In order to get a better "flow", I created the character of Jules to serve as a narrator for our story. This fundamentally changed the entire structure of the story. The story now involved complicated aspects of narrator, parallel timelines, dimension-hopping, and time travelling. This iteration included a new concept for a villain, known as Christian. Christian, named after the Green Day rock opera protagonist from 21st Century Breakdown, would take the place of narrator after Jules. He was essentially a copy-paste of Caliborn from Homestuck, including aspects of Lord English as well. He would interfere with Sol and mock his friends, leading to a Game Over-esque situation. There was also a character who made it to the published version of Sol 10, named Scott, a character found in the texting segments at the end of the episode. He was planned to have the universe inside of his head. Yeah. I didn't realize how much it conflicted with parallel realities and time travel until later. So, this was what episode 1 was written with in mind. A few weeks later, when sitting in math class, I drafted the second episode of Sol 10. The plot had radically changed. Episode 2 focused on Hardeen. Realizing I had no way to explain how magic worked, I quickly came up with MacGuffins. Not wanting to spoil too much, MacGuffins are objects infused with pure mental power that lets them accomplish things normally deemed imaginary or fantastical. The series would now develop a secondary goal for the heroes, albeit a poorly written one. Laika and Sol want to use the powers of the MacGuffins to revive their fallen comrades, while still attempting to defend the universe from its end. So, we needed some other villains. Christian wasn't a grandeur villain trying to end the universe. I created the Wicked, a strange cult with admins based around the seven sins, like a shitty Pokemon team. This created new arcs, new concepts, and new problems. I'd have to introduce tons of new characters to make some of the simplest arcs work, which is what led to the Episode 3 problem. That's where I'm stumped writing right now. The episode revolves around Sol grabbing a new MacGuffin while fighting a menagerie of minor villains who will become major villains later on. The problem is, I've planned the series out so much that this episode is crucial to the plot. These characters need to be introduced, and they need to be introduced NOW. But it's impossible to introduce so many characters in one episode, especially in Sol 10. It just doesn't work. The Sol Solution The SOLution here is to completely reboot the series. It's something I've wanted to do for a long while now. Back when the first two episodes were written, Sol 10 didn't know what it was. Now, it does, but the problem is that it's shackled by the original plans and the constraints locked to the first two episodes. The best way to resolve this and continue the series is to declare the first two episodes non-canon and to revive the series.